Cleveland in My Dreams

I can tell you that the idea came from my uncle Jerry Nathan, the younger of my mother's two brothers. He was a perfectly wonderful man, an accomplished pianist who walked away from a background in chemical engineering to morph into a promoter of jazz and rock concerts and a backgammon instructor. And one night he told me a story that, several years later, turned into "Cleveland in My Dreams."

And I can tell you where and when it was written. It was the fall of 1985, but it felt like summer, because my wife and I had just relocated from New York to Fort Myers Beach, Florida. We'd developed a seminar that focused on the inner game of writing, and I wish we'd called it that. (Instead we called it Write For Your Life, only to discover that people who just HEARD the title thought we had a position on abortion.) I was writing a book version of the seminar - it's available now as an eBook - and it would be our first early venture into self-publishing.

I wrote that book in nine or ten days - I knew exactly what I wanted to say, and went ahead and said it - and then one morning I found myself thinking about Uncle Jerry and the story he'd told, and a few hours later it was on paper, and Eleanor Sullivan bought it right away for EQMM.

A year or so later Jerry was gone, dead too young. And not long after that we knew we'd had enough of Florida and spent a couple of years without a fixed address before winding up back in New York, wondering what ever made us think we could live anywhere else.

While I won't try to describe "Cleveland in My Dreams," I will tell you that it's been chosen for a batch of anthologies, and sold a few times for filming. (The BBC changed Cleveland to Bradford. "Bradford in My Dreams," with my friend Chris Langham.) There was at least one short film made in the US, by Mark Sullivan, with Cleveland remaining in the title. There could be more; what I do, to encourage short filmmakers - well, makers of short films, I should say - is sell non-exclusive rights at a very reasonable price. So,irrespective of your own physical stature, if you want to turn any of my stories into a short film, just get in touch.

And will you look how much I've written here, just to avoid describing the story itself?